Light Yourself on Fire - Intimacy Review
by Mark Hensch
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Light Yourself on Fire's Intimacy is a few cinders short of a raging blaze. Clocking in at an underwhelming seventeen minutes, this "full length" album is plagued by a surprisingly large amount of problems given its short length. Hell, even the title is a misnomer---this is an album which inspires detachment and apathy, not Intimacy.
The biggest problem on offer here is the band's largely baseless identity. Intimacy features grind song lengths, death metal crunch, spastic hardcore vocals, and alternative lyrics rooted in philosophy and literature. Sadly, these traits never materialize into either a unique blend of styles or a coherent fusion of several preexisting genres.
This dichotomy produces an album that sounds like really short, unfinished deathcore songs laced with a few random, senseless winks to other things. Even if a particular song features a distinctive feature, the relative speed at which things clip by loses all individuality from song to song in the shuffle.
Opening combination "New Baby Girl" and "Love and Death," for example, are semi-interchangeable. Both feature quasi-philosophical samples interspersed with loud, twitching riffs that lead nowhere remarkable fast. The sound is admittedly crisp, but for its entire studio punch the music itself seems a little trite.
"Five Blows" starts with yet another sample before launching into a noisy deathcore snapshot. The unsettling dissonance shows a band with a potential for actual atmosphere, but all progress is lost in a brief hail of paint-by-numbers grooving.
Title track "Intimacy" is in my opinion the only worthwhile cut on offer here. Unfortunately, this means little as the song appears to be a mere joke Here, Light Yourself on Fire mixes Latin rhythms with their muscular deathcore in a combination probably too goofy to be taken seriously.
I will only mention "Montag" as the pointless sample it is, but album closer "Haunts" mixes reflective guitars with long-winded samples and some explosive endgame dynamics. Normally, I might even dig something in this vein. Not here though---the song is too short and redundant.
When giving listeners only seventeen minutes of music, a band should make the best of what they have to offer. This goal, by the by, is not achieved by gobbling up record time with pointless noise experimentation and meaningless samples. Intimacy, then, is bloated with too much filler and uninspiring music for a record this short. Beyond this, however, is the fact that an expanded version of this album would be even more droll and tiring. With this in mind, the only thing that should be lit on fire is a disc as bland as this one.
Light Yourself on Fire's Intimacy
New Baby Girl
Love and Death
Five Blows
Intimacy
Montag
Haunts
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Light Yourself on Fire - Intimacy Rating:5.0
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